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What It Takes To Become A High Potential IT Leader

Thursday, September 2nd, 2010
Image Credit High Potential IT Leaders Are The Ones Who Become Successful

High Potential IT Leaders Are The Ones Who Become Successful

What is it going to take to make your IT Leader career a success? Sure, you can deliver IT value and get your projects done on time, but will that be enough? The answer is no. For you to be seen as a successful IT Leader you are going to have to be seen as a “high potential” IT Leader – one who is going to go places beyond your current assignment. Clearly you need to know what it’s going to take to get others to consider you to be high potential…

The Intangibles

The reason that many IT Leaders get stuck in their current job with the current responsibilities is because others don’t believe that they have “what it takes” to handle other responsibilities. The things that it will take for you to be viewed as being a high potential are intangible (can’t really be expressed in words) and generally can’t be written down on job descriptions or yearly evaluations.

The good news is that Dr. Douglas Ready and a team of researchers have been looking into what it takes for an IT worker to move from regular to high potential workers. They’ve uncovered four factors that can transform you from everyday to high potential in the eyes of others.

Drive Time

Do you have what it takes to succeed? Can others tell that you have this drive? Just being good isn’t enough for you – you have to want to be great and it needs to show.

The key here is that others need to be able to determine that you are willing to make the extra effort to succeed. This means that they are going to have to be able to see you make sacrifices in order to advance in your career. Everyone has to know that your personal life comes second when it comes to your job.

The Ability To Learn / Do

High potential IT Leaders are always learning new things. However, this isn’t enough. Just because you are willing to constantly be learning new things doesn’t make you a high potential IT worker.

Instead, you need to show others that you have the ability to not only learn new things, but to also take what you’ve learned and apply it to what is happening right now. The use of new ideas to make IT more productive for the company is what is going to set you apart from everyone else.

Become A Risk Taker

Despite all of us understanding that IT is all about change, it can be too easy for IT Leaders to get comfortable in their jobs. When this happens, they lose the desire to take new risks and they are no longer viewed by others as being high potential IT Leaders.

What we need to do is to be willing to take on new ways to make the company more productive. Sometimes this involves starting a risky new project, or developing a new set of IT skills that will require us to leave what we already know behind.

Develop Your “Spidy Sense”

The comic book hero Spiderman has what he calls his “spidy sense” which tingles when there is danger approaching. High potential IT Leaders need to develop their own version of this type of sensing that allows them to detect when a danger to their careers is approaching.

Career dangers can include such things as projects that are doomed to fail from the start, or avoiding providing feedback to senior managers that could help the company do better. High potential IT Leaders have a highly developed sense that allows them to know when to push forward and when to pull back.

What All Of This Means For You

Just being a IT Leader is not enough. In fact, just being a good IT Leader is not enough either. What you want to be is a high-potential IT Leader . This will open doors to new opportunities at the firm that you are working for and at other firms also.

In order to start to be seen as being “high potential”, you are going to have to start doing several things. These include showing a keen sense of drive to succeed, the ability to both learn new things and then apply what you’ve learned, take proper risks, and sense when an opportunity is either a good thing or a bad thing for your career.

The good news is that any IT Leader can become a high potential IT Leader . Simply by adopting these traits you can quickly move from being seen as simply a good IT Leader to being seen as a high potential IT Leader.

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World IT Management Skills™

Question For You: Would you be willing to make sacrifices in your personal life in order to be seen as a high potential IT Leader?

Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental IT Leader Blog is updated.

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

Ok, enough of this cloud stuff already! The field of IT is just like every other field out there and we have our own share of trendy topics – cloud computing sure seems to the one that we’re dealing with right now. With all of the magazine articles on clouds and conferences going on, you’d think that every IT Leader and CEO has a good understanding of just exactly what a cloud is. Well, you’d be wrong…

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Posted in career | No Comments »

Why A Quiet IT Team Should Make An IT Leader Nervous

Thursday, August 26th, 2010
Image Credit Just Because You Can't Hear It, Doesn't Mean That They Aren't Talking

Just Because You Can't Hear It, Doesn't Mean That They Aren't Talking

It turns out that an IT Leader really doesn’t do all that much. I mean, they probably don’t do any coding, they don’t debug network problems, and they don’t design next-generation storage solutions. Sorta makes you wonder just exactly they do do? It turns out that most of an IT Leader’s time is spent doing scary stuff, like managing people…

Why Silence Is NOT Golden

So here’s an interesting thought: if one of your primary jobs is to manage your IT team, then how are you going to be able to tell if you are doing a good job? One way that might come to mind right off the bat is if you don’t hear any complaints than certainly you must be doing a good job, right?

It turns out that Dr. James Detert, a researcher at Cornell, and a team have been looking into what workers do and don’t tell their bosses. The results (and the reasons for them) just might surprise you. Here are four common myths that every IT Leader should know are not true.

Myth: Women Are Less Likely To Speak Up

Most managers believe that women and non-professional IT workers are more likely to NOT speak up simply because they think that it will either harm their career or just isn’t worth the effort. I must confess that I believed this myth.

It turns out that this just isn’t so. Based on studies that were done by Dr. Detert and his team, it turns out that women and non-professional IT workers are just as likely as professional men to speak up in the workplace. In fact, the researchers have shown that your gender, level of education, and your level of income have no bearing on the probability that you’ll express your opinions at work.

Myth: Talkers Tell All

IT Leaders who are getting a lot of feedback from their IT team may start to feel confidant that they are in touch with everything that is going on. I mean come on, if your team is talking to you then they’ve got to be telling you everything, right?

Sorry, once again it turns out that this is not the case. In studies that were done by the researchers it turned out that almost half of the workers polled said that they hold back. The reasons varied, but the most common causes of IT employees holding their tongues were when they thought it wouldn’t do any good or when they thought it might harm their career.

Myth: Safety First

IT Leaders who have a problem with their team not talking to them may wonder why. A natural first assumption is that their IT team for some reason doesn’t feel safe doing so. For some reason, the thinking goes, they believe that speaking up about an issue will come back to haunt them.

Well guess what, the reasons that your team might not be talking to you is actually much more boring than that. The number one reason that someone on a team won’t tell their boss what’s really going on is, drum roll please, simply because they are too busy – they don’t want to waste their time. Ouch, that hurts!

Myth: Only The Big Issues Are Scary

Finally, you would assume that it would be the big issues that would cause IT workers to hold back. You know, things that involve actual crimes or unethical things. Oops, once again you’d be wrong.

The researchers found that IT workers will not speak up on even the smallest issues. Unfortunately these are the very issues that an IT leader needs to hear about if he / she wants to improve how IT can help the company operate.

What All Of This Means For You

The technology part of being a IT Leader is probably easier than the people part. However, you are going to have to be good at both if you want to be a successful manager.

One of the most important things that you’ll need to realize is that your best way of identifying issues is to get your team to tell you about them. Not hearing about issues doesn’t mean that they don’t exist. We’ve pointed out four myths that can lead an IT Leader to make the wrong conclusions.

Now that you know that silence doesn’t necessarily mean that you don’t have any problems, you are ready to take the next step. This means that you’ve got to go out and form real relationships with your team so that you’ll be able to tell when they are holding back – and then you’ll know that it’s time to dig deeper!

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World IT Management Skills™

Question For You: Do you think that having an “open door policy” really means anything for today’s IT Leaders?

Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental IT Leader Blog is updated.

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

What is it going to take to make your IT Leader career a success? Sure, you can deliver IT value and get your projects done on time, but will that be enough? The answer is no. For you to be seen as a successful IT Leader you are going to have to be seen as a “high potential” IT Leader – one who is going to go places beyond your current assignment. Clearly you need to know what it’s going to take to get others to consider you to be high potential…

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Posted in management | No Comments »

3 Skills That Most IT Leaders Are Missing

Thursday, August 19th, 2010
Image Credit You Can't Be A Complete IT Leader Without These Skills

You Can't Be A Complete IT Leader Without These Skills

I’m guessing that you wouldn’t go to work naked. Then why-oh-why are you thinking about going to work as an IT Leader when you don’t have all of the skills that you’ll need to do the job correctly?

I’m not sure if this is going to make you feel any better, but it turns out that most IT Leaders are showing up for work only partially dressed when you consider what skills they are missing. Maybe we’d better have a talk about this…

Can You Communicate?

All too often, IT folks assume that good communication skills mean that you have the ability to get up in front of a group of people and deliver a speech without bursting into flames. Yes, this is good skill to have, but IT Leaders need to have more.

Remember, communication is a two-way street and not only does an IT Leader need to be able to tell others what to do, but you are also going to have to be able to listen to what others are telling you.

No, we’re not talking about having the ability to sit there and listen when someone else is talking to just waiting for them to pause so that you can start talking again. Instead, an IT Leader needs to be able to listen, process what has been said, and then ask good, pointed questions that will help get to the bottom of any discussion.

Just to round things out, an IT Leader also needs to have the communication skill that will allow them to “close” a discussion. This is when you ask a final question and then have the strength to keep you mouth closed and allow the other person to provide an answer. This is how you wrap things up cleanly.

Promote, Promote, Promote!

All too often IT Leaders seem to have a “build it and they will come” sort of attitude. They believe that if their team and by extension themselves do a good job then the rest of the company will realize it and their value to the company will increase. Sorry, it doesn’t work that way.

What IT Leaders need to be doing is constantly promoting both themselves and their team. Now you have to be careful here, note that I didn’t say “bragging”. The difference is subtle, but important.

One way that an IT Leader can show the value of both his position as well as his team is to become the thought leader on all things technical. By researching new technologies and then taking the time to educate the rest of the company about what they mean and how they can be used by the business in order to be more successful, both the IT leader and his team will become recognized as a valuable resource.

Make A Friend (or Two)

Within the world of IT, there is often a “loner” attitude that many of us hold: I can do it all by myself. As an IT Leader, you need to stop thinking this way and start making as many contacts as you can.

Your career will only be as strong as your network and that means taking the time to develop real relationships with as many people as possible. Not all IT Leaders have this skill.

What All Of This Means For You

If you really want to be a successful IT Leader, you’ve got some work to do. There are a set of skills that you’ll need to develop in order to be successful over the long run.

To be an IT Leader who has the ability to get things done, you’re going to have to have the ability to be a good two-way communicator. You’ll have to learn to spend your time tirelessly promoting both the your team and your value to the company. Finally, you are going to have to get good at that critical skill: networking.

None of these three skills are impossible to do. However, the key to being a successful IT Leader is to get good at doing all three at the same time…!

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World IT Management Skills™

Question For You: Which of these three skills do you think is the most important for an IT Leader to have?

Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental IT Leader Blog is updated.

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

It turns out that an IT Leader really doesn’t do all that much. I mean, they probably don’t do any coding, they don’t debug network problems, and they don’t design next-generation storage solutions. Sorta makes you wonder just exactly they do do? It turns out that most of an IT Leader’s time is spent doing scary stuff, like managing people…

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Posted in career development | No Comments »

Open Source: Is This A Good Thing Or A Bad Thing For IT?

Thursday, August 12th, 2010
Image Credit Is Using Open Source Software A Good Thing Or A Bad Thing?

Is Using Open Source Software A Good Thing Or A Bad Thing?

What if software was free? Every IT Leader has to stop and ask themselves this question every once in awhile. With the cost of ERP and database systems constantly increasing, software costs can quickly become a significant expense for any IT department. The “Open Source” software movement, born in the days when Napster was giving away commercial music for free, is one way the IT departments can get high quality software for free. But should they?

The Many Flavors Of Open Source

There isn’t enough space in this article to list all of the open source projects and applications that are out there. Some of the more famous include the LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and Python) . In my business I use WordPress to blog and vTiger for CRM; however, there is also the Movable Type platform and SugarCRM to choose from.

A healthy open source project has lots of programmers contributing changes and new features to it. It needs strong central management in order to do good project management: what goes into the next release, who tests it, and when it’s available for general release.

Why IT Leaders Should Use Open Source

When an IT Leader considers using open source applications as a part of a IT project, support is the first thought that springs to mind. In the world of Linux this issue has been solved by the arrival of multiple firms that provide professional support for given flavors of Linux distro (Redhat, etc.).

If an open source package is popular, there will be a firm out there that can provide support for it. However, one of the unique aspects of the open source movement is that there is a very large unofficial support group for virtually every application. On countless web sites and support boards, IT staffers who run into a problem with an open source application can post their issues. Eager users and volunteer programmers will more often than not spring into action and provide quick suggestions on how to solve the problem.

One additional benefit of using open source is that it gives an IT Leader a way to motivate and retain staff. Allowing your members of your team to work on an open source project and to contribute new features that they develop to the overall project can be a fantastic motivational tool. This allows the them to feel that they are contributing to a worthwhile cause. Happy workers don’t want to leave their team.

Why IT Leaders Should Not Use Open Source

You’d think that the case for using open source was open and shut, right? I mean after all it’s free. However, before you leap you may want to double think taking that plunge.

For one thing, the road to today is littered with open source projects that were born, flourished for awhile, and then died due to lack of interest. It truly does take a village to keep one of these things going and if you’ve based a mission critical process on an open source app that dies, then you may be left high and dry.

Support is another issue. The concept of having “one throat to choke” is one thing that helps IT Leaders sleep well at night. If you are using open source, then there may be no responsible party for you to reach out to if all of a sudden things stop working.

Your specific IT configuration may no longer be supported at some point in time: if the rest of the world moves on to the next version of an operating system and it’s not yet time for you to do so, your open source apps may stop working.

Finally, the more time that your team spends working on open source apps, the more transferable their job skills may become. They may decide to pick up and move on after they’ve gained the knowledge that you paid them to learn.

What All Of This Means For You

For IT Leaders, the world of open source software keeps getting even larger and more established than it is today. You are going to have to make some hard decisions as to just how far into the open source pond you are willing to wade with your team.

Open source often comes with little or no formal support. However, the sheer number of people working on a project can fill in the gaps. Allowing your team to work on open source projects can be a double edged sword: they’ll have more job satisfaction, but they might end up leaving.

The price of open source software really isn’t free – you’ll have to make an investment in it if you want to use it. Pick wisely and you just might become know as the open IT Leader.

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World IT Management Skills™

Question For You: What pieces of open source software will you start to use first?

Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental IT Leader Blog is updated.

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

I’m guessing that you wouldn’t go to work naked. Then why-oh-why are you thinking about going to work as an IT Leader when you don’t have all of the skills that you’ll need to do the job correctly?

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Posted in open | No Comments »

Is On-Demand The Right Solution For Your IT Team?

Thursday, August 5th, 2010
Image Credit Sure It Sounds Great, But Is On-Demand Right For You?

Sure It Sounds Great, But Is On-Demand Right For You?

If you’ve been reading any of the trade press over the last couple of years, you have undoubtedly run across story after story that talked about the next big thing in IT: on-demand computing. I’m willing to bet that members of your IT team may be clambering to take your next project “into the cloud”. Sure it sounds sexy, but should you do it…?

It’s All About The Upside

Look, haven’t we all finally figured out how to do all of this IT stuff the right way? Why would any IT Leader in his / her right mind even consider using an on-demand solution when you are creating your next enterprise solution?

The upside of moving your team’s efforts to using an on-demand IT architecture are pretty powerful: much lower hardware requirements (for you, maybe not so for the on-demand provider!), a drop software development costs, and simplifying the always-present challenge of how you can update an application that is used by lots and lots of employees. Having a single version of an application that exists on an on-demand system sure seems to be the right way to go. Or is it…?

…But Then There’s That Downside

Pesky issues such as reliability keep popping up when IT Leaders start to talk about on-demand based IT solutions. What are your customers going to do if the on-demand system can’t be reached. Oh, and how long is this down time going to last…?

Can anyone say “customization”? When you have a single version of an application running in an on-demand environment your end users will by necessity lose at least some of their ability to customize the application. Is this a big deal? It all depends on how big of an impact on productivity that customization had…

No man is an island and the same thing can be said for your IT applications. It turns out that integrating an on-demand application into all of those other applications that the company is using can be a tough nut to crack. Yes it can be done, but no it’s not going to be easy.

What All Of This Means For You

For those of you who were looking a silver bullet solution and thought that you had found it in the on-demand design, sorry. Yes there are benefits, but these come with some serious costs.

Getting out of the business of having to worry about what hardware your solutions are running on and where they are located would be a great feeling. However, you then start to have a brand new set of reliability and integration issues that show up.

In the end, on-demand is here to stay and just based on the cost savings that it delivers alone it’s going to be the right solution for certain IT challenges. However, it’s the wise IT Leader who pauses before jumping into the on-demand lake and makes sure that it’s the right decision for right now…

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World IT Management Skills™

Question For You: Do you think that the on-demand security issues will ever be solved or will we just learn to live with them?

Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental IT Leader Blog is updated.

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

What if software was free? Every IT Leader has to stop and ask themselves this question every once in awhile. With the cost of ERP and database systems constantly increasing, software costs can quickly become a significant expense for any IT department. The “Open Source” software movement, born in the days when Napster was giving away commercial music for free, is one way the IT departments can get high quality software for free. But should they?

Tags: , , , , , ,
Posted in cloud | 2 Comments »

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